25 Amazing Food Infographics, Drawn From 49,733 Recipes

A detail from a chart showing all 49,733 recipes. The curved axis shows the rating, and the x-axis shows the number of reviews. For the huge, full version, look at the post below.

The circumference of the circles represent the number of ingredients in each recipe. For the huge, full version, look at the post below.

By querying our database, we were able to figure out exactly how many pounds of various proteins existed on the site. The single bull's testicle was from a recipe for Rocky Mountain Oysters.

One of the more novel analyses we did: We looked at recipes of various types, such as sandwiches, and tallied their averages if they included bacon and if they did not. Almost everything improves with bacon, except finicky cream sauces and deserts, which cause the bacon fat to congeal.

We figured that a good way to see what proteins people were eating was to add up the amounts of chicken, beef, and pork called for on the whole site. Fish was far less popular.

A chart showing the top-three chefs by total chicken called for in their recipes, multiplied by the number of reviews for each rating. You'll notice that they're all women—presumably because female celebrity chefs try to cook healthier.

A bar chart showing the overall average rating for several of Food Network's top chefs. We were contractually disallowed from looking at ratings for chefs not current on air, such as Mario Batali.

Here, we grouped various types of recipes, and analyzed how well each chef did for each grouping. Note the scale, which was necessary to tease out differences since the data were so tightly clustered.

Women in general did better with lighter meals—which makes sense, given how they tend to cook healthier, as we saw in the previous chicken chart.

Here, we mapped all of the 906,539 ratings on the entirely of Foodnetwork.com, yielding a topological map of the website's user base.

We then went further by calculating the cities with the highest percentage of reviews dedicated to a particular food, such steak.

Here's the map for lobster. As you can see, thee maps tend to confirm common intuitions about regional food preferences--in this case, the idea that people on the coasts eat more seafood...

...while Texans simply love chili.

A handy chart showing you exactly what to prepare, and when. Each recipe mentioned is the top-rated recipe in its category.

We realized that prep time vs. number of ingredients was a good way to map the relatively complexity of similar dishes. Here are four top-rated stuffing recipes...

...and four top-rated pumpkin pie recipes. Unless you've got time and money to burn, may we suggest keeping it simple?

A chart of the site's top-rated turkey recipes, and how their preparation regiments compare.

A chart of all the pie recipes on Foodnetwork.com, which gives a pretty good indicator of what pies there's most demand for.

One of the more interesting findings we uncovered: Food with more ingredients reliably turns out better.

We also looked a food fads, by charting the portion of their ratings that accrued over each quarter. Here, you can see three trends that seem to be going pretty strong...

...and here are two trends that were very much fads of the mid-2000's.

And three trends that seem just to be gaining steam in recent years.

One of the more revealing analyses: A look at the recipes with the highest standard deviations on the site--basically, a short-hand for which recipes were most controversial, based on wide variability in ratings. Some of this is driven by viral jokes. For example, the reviews for Late Night Bacon have become something of a mini-meme.

We couldn't resist doing some wonky calculations, such as the length of all the spaghetti in all the recipes called for on the site. We actually counted how many strands of spaghetti come in a typical box of Barilla No.9 spaghetti!

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Every day, Google's servers crawl the web, quietly amassing a mirror image of the internet, so that the search behemoth can index everything and serve up lighting-fast responses to any question, no matter how inane. But there's a dark side to this process: The countless marketing companies and hackers who write web-crawling scripts to gather massive data sets that serve their own ends.

So we wondered: How could we take that same web-crawling process and subvert it? Could we scrape a decently massive dataset and produce something wonderful?

We hit upon a ripe target: Food Network has amassed one of the richest repositories of cookery available today: Its website racks up over 200 million pageviews a month. But go try and find the perfect Bolognese recipe in 10 minutes. You can’t. There’s simply too much information, and it’s virtually impossible to extract any trends or heuristics from the dumb progression of web pages. This is the state of the web in a nutshell.

>How could we take that same web-crawling process, and subvert it?

Things quickly got complicated. You can't simply go out and scrape a massive site like the Food Network's without getting sued—those voluminous terms of service agreements that you find at the bottom of most websites are designed to prevent anyone from taking data and republishing it. So we asked Food Network very, very nicely: Would you be willing to let us scrape your data, with the aim of creating as many infographics as we can dream up? Pretty please? Amazingly, Food Network agreed. (Thanks Danielle!)

Then we got to work. First, we hired a world-class data-miner, Dylan Fried. He employed tools that are fairly common on the web, if you know where to look. In particular, he used a bunch of Python web-scraping scripts, to crawl all 49,733 Recipes and 906,539 Ratings on Foodnetwork.com, then he dumped those into Mongo, a non-relational database that let us do all kinds of crazy queries.

Maybe the most visually stunning thing we were able to create was a chart showing the structure behind every single one of those 49,733 recipes. On the x-axis are the number of ratings; on the curved axis are the average ratings for each recipe:

Joseph Reyes

As you can see, there's structure there that you would ordinarily never be able to see. You can spy outliers, and spot the clusters where the data gets super dense. You can see how there's a massive clumping of recipes that are all in the range of being pretty good–that is, which have an average rating somewhere above four stars.

Obviously, we didn't stop there. With just a few lines of code, we were able to ask the database some wacky questions, such as: How do all the celebrity chefs on Food Network stack up? Which foods are popular in various regions across the U.S.? And of course, is everything really better with bacon? The 26 infographics you see above, created by Josef Reyes and Catalogtree, represent some of our coolest findings, gathered over a three month period that involved hundreds of different queries, and many false leads. Our aim was to shed light on how Americans eat, using the database we had amassed: We figured out a way to create a report card for all the chefs on the network; visualized all the top recipes you might make for Thanksgiving; and dissected the food trends that have waxed and waned in the last six years. You can see the fruit of all that labor in the slides above, and captions detailing how each one was made. There's plenty of tasty nuggets. Enjoy!